For old versions of Ubuntu that only supply old versions of Octave, consider using Octave's PPA. For more details, see the Debian specific instructions page.

There are also Debian packages for each of the Octave Forge packages, named octave-<pkg>, for example octave-image and octave-statistics for the image processing and statistics package respectively. A complete list of them can be found with the command

octave-devel contains the octave headers and mkoctfile script and is really only needed by users who are developing code that is to be dynamically linked to octave. octave can be installed with the command:

Octave is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions through the EPEL repository. This section applies to CentOS, Scientific Linux, and other Red Hat Enterprise rebuild distributions as well.

Method 1 - the quick way:

yum install epel-release
yum install octave

Method 2 - if the above does not work:

First, follow these instructions to set up your system to install packages from EPEL. For example,

Once the EPEL repository has been enabled, you can follow the rest of the instructions for Fedora to install Octave using yum.

Note that EPEL intentionally does not follow new releases as closely as other distributions. Consequently, the version of Octave provided by EPEL may be several months or years out of date. There are plans for the Octave maintainers to provide support and binary RPMs for enterprise GNU/Linux distributions; contact the maintainers mailing list for more information.

Octave is provided by the Homebrew package manager, which is a cross-distribution packaging system. "Homebrew on Linux" was formerly a fork known as Linuxbrew. It is possible to install the current release of Octave or the development version and any needed dependencies within your home directory. This is particularly useful if you have an older GNU/Linux distribution or if you do not have root access.

Octave is available as a Docker container. This can be used to easily run Octave in a well-defined, minimal GNU/Linux container. It can be used as a standard interactive Octave shell or to run scripts, but it may be mostly of interest to developers for use in automated build, test, or CI environments.